The Boxee Box: Intel Inside, Available for Preorder

Boxee and D-Link are announcing today that their upcoming Boxee Box will be powered by Intel’s CE4100 Atom processor. The online video set-top-box, which will ship in early November, can also be pre-ordered from Amazon.com starting today. The device is selling for $200 in the U.S., and will be launched simultaneously in Canada, the EU and Australia.

Boxee had previously said that the device would be based on NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 chipset. Boxee’s VP of Marketing Andrew Kippen told me this weekend that the Tegra chips fell short in the number of supported video formats, causing the two companies to switch to Intel instead. This switch also led to the delayed release of the box, which was originally scheduled to go on sale in June.

Kippen confirmed that the box will ship with the upcoming version 1.0 of Boxee, and he promised “a new look and feel” for the media center software. Boxee 1.0 is going to include a Webkit-based browser that’s supposed make full use of HTML5 and bring more web video content, as well as web apps, onto the TV. Boxee also said that the software will offer access to nearly 40,000 TV show episodes, and the company’s Lead Apps Developer Rob Spectre told me last week that Boxee users now have access to around 400 apps.

Boxee’s hardware will ship with a unique double-sided remote control, offering simple TV controls as well as a full QWERTY keyboard. The box is capable of playing full 1080p HD content and will come with integrated 802.11N wireless connectivity. It doesn’t come with any internal storage, but has two USB ports for external storage.